“But we need to talk to this leader you spoke about,” said Woolf. “Can you take us to him or her?”

“I can take you to her,” said Vinci, “but I can’t guarantee it will do any good.”

Woolf frowned. “Is she dying, too? Is it”—he struggled for words—“her time?”

“She’s a member of the Trust,” said Vinci. “They’re our leaders, and as far as we can tell, they don’t expire. But General Trimble is . . . well, you’ll see. Follow me, but leave your weapons. And it’s dangerous, like I said: No offense, but a group of humans are nothing but dead weight on a Partial battlefield. If you see or hear anything remotely like gunfire, hide.”

Woolf frowned. “Just hide? That’s it?”

Vinci shrugged. “Well, hide and pray.”

White Plains was like nothing Marcus had ever seen before, though the ride in should have prepared him: They didn’t hike in or ride on a wagon, they rode in the back of a truck. A real truck, with an engine. The driver was a Partial named Mandy, presumably one of the pilots Samm had told them about, and she eyed them suspiciously all the way into town, despite the fact that they’d been disarmed and searched and even stripped of most of their gear. Marcus had seen self-propelled vehicles in action before, of course, but to see them used so casually was astonishing. In East Meadow they used them for emergencies only, when speed was paramount. Here they just drove around like it was nothing.

Then they passed another truck on a crossroad, and then another.

Then they got to the city itself.

Marcus had spent so much time in the ruins of a city that seeing one in prime condition was shocking, and somehow disturbing. Instead of pedestrians the streets were full of cars; instead of lamps and candles the homes were lit with electrical light—porch lights, streetlights, ceiling lights, even light-up signs on the buildings. The entire city seemed to glow with them. More subtly, but more confounding once he noticed it, the buildings all had windows. Windows had been one of the first things to go after the Break, with freeze-thaw cycles shifting the frames of unheated buildings, and flocks of birds and other animals finishing off the rest. In East Meadow only the populated homes had windows, and the bottom few floors of the hospital where they worked to maintain them, but everywhere else they were broken. Nearly every window they’d passed in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and New Jersey had been broken. But not here. It was like a city from before the Break, pulled forward in time, untouched by the apocalypse that had destroyed the rest of the world.